Above the gaping hole that led into the building someone had spray-painted, “Welcome to Morey Hilton.”
Inside, the heat became oppressive. Nohar was nearly used to the itch under his shirt, but in the sweltering lobby—it might have been because of the still lingering smell of fire—he had to take it off. He leaned against the hulk of a station wagon someone had driven into the lobby, waiting to become acclimated to the heat.
No sign of the squatters yet, but Nohar doubted any lived near the first floor. That would be a little too close to the action. The empty beer bulbs scattered across the floor, the occasional cartridge from an air-hypo, the fresh bullet pockmarks, marked the lobby as a party spot for the gangs. Not to mention “Zipperhead” painted on the side of the station wagon. Hmm, Nohar corrected himself. Gang—singular. Lately, the one gang seemed to be it. He didn’t know exactly what to make of that. There had been at least five gangs around when he had been running with the Hellcats. But that was a long time ago—the years before this building burned up—and Nohar really didn’t want to think about it.
He decided he had waited long enough and went straight for one of the open stairwells. The winding concrete stairs were swathed in darkness, and Nohar’s view became colorless and nocturnal. Here, the heat was even worse, and the smell of fire was overwhelmed by the aromas of rust, mold, and rotting garbage. The stairs were concrete, but every other footstep fell on something soft.
Nohar tried to ignore the garbage and think like a sniper. The face of the burned-out wing was pointed at the target, so the assassin would take a point amidst the wreckage. Few squatters in the remains of the fire—
Nohar hit floor ten and had to pause because he thought he’d come across a corpse. A lepus was curled in a fetal position in the corner of the tenth-floor landing. An acrid odor announced the fact the rabbit had soiled—him, her? Nohar couldn’t tell in the dark—itself. As he approached, the rabbit’s twitching showed it was still among the living. An air-hypo cartridge lay on the ground.
A jacked rabbit—might have even been funny if it hadn’t been so obvious the rabbit was on flush, and having a bad reaction. Nohar knelt next to the rabbit. She—Nohar could tell now—wasn’t wearing anything. Filth covered her dark fur. He felt a wave of anger when he didn’t see the hypo. That meant one of two things. Either someone had done her, or had stolen the hypo. In both cases they’d left her on her own like this. Scenes like this made Nohar think the fundamentalists might be right and moreys were an abomination in the eyes of whatever deity.
It was flush, all the classic symptoms. Near catatonia, chills, dehydration, voiding the bowels, rolling up of the eyes, shallow breathing, slight nosebleed. She was lucky. In truly severe reactions, the nervous system went. Then he would have found a corpse. She’d been through the worst of it, though. What she needed now was light and water. The darkness tended to perpetuate the hallucinogenic effects of flush. She could be psychologically unable to move long after the physical effects had worn off.
Nohar picked her up. She weighed nothing. She was a small morey to begin with, and she was skinny as well. He hoped the squatters still kept those rain barrels up topside.
On the burned-out wing, with the exception of the concrete facade, the top three floors were gone. Nohar carried the rabbit out of the stairwell and into the open air of the seventeenth floor. Nohar saw the orange plastic barrels immediately. Good, the occupants still collected rainwater. He looked at the shivering rabbit, silently asked himself what he was doing, and lowered her face gently into one of the cleaner barrels.
The moment the water brushed the side of her face, her ears picked up. Good sign. They stayed like that, Nohar holding her face just above the water, the rabbit curled up with her neck resting on the edge of the barrel, for close to fifteen minutes. The only thing keeping Nohar from giving up on her brain-lock was the gradual improvement, and the fact she did seem to be drinking a little.
There had to be a better way to deal with this, Nohar thought. He wasn’t a trained medic. He was following the home procedure for a bad flush trip. It was a lot easier with a toilet handy—the running joke was, the comedown in the head was the way the drug got its street name.
A sputtering came from the barrel. Nohar hoped she wouldn’t vomit. “Listen to my voice.” Nohar tried to sound reassuring. “It was a bad trip, but you’re coming back. It wasn’t real. You can relax now. It’s important to untense your muscles, slowly—”
After a decade plus, the lines came back with surprising ease. She didn’t say anything as he talked her down, and Nohar counted himself lucky she wasn’t a screamer.
“Let go, damnit!”
A wide foot made a hollow slap on Nohar’s chest, announcing the fact she had regained some contact with reality. Nohar didn’t think letting go of her was a good idea, but the rabbit had suddenly erupted into thrashing motion from near paralysis. She was saying something in Spanish, and from the tone of her voice, it wasn’t very pleasant. Good intentions only went so far. He set her down next to the barrel. She was panting, and a little unsteady on her feet.
Nohar rubbed his shoulder. It was tightening up after the stress of holding the rabbit above the barrel. He knew he was asking for it, but he said it anyway. “Are you all right?”
She looked up. She had a scar on one cheek that turned up her mouth in a quirky smile, as if she enjoyed some private joke at his expense. “Don’t do no favors, Kit.”
“Name’s Nohar.” He shrugged and started walking toward the windows on the south wall.
He got to the windows, began looking for Johnson’s house, and immediately realized the limitations of his vision. The houses were mere blobs.
Nohar turned back to the rain barrel and saw the rabbit, apparently recovering out of sheer cussedness, doing her best to clean herself off with a rag. Oops, not a rag, he had left his shirt over there. Oh, well, the shirt was too hot anyway.
“Hey, Fluffy—”
She glared at him.
“Better at giving favors than receiving them?”
“Name’s Angel. Fuck you.”
“You owe me something for that shirt you just wasted.”
She looked at the dripping cloth she’d been wiping herself with. “Yeah, you and every Ziphead this side of nirvana.”
“Your trip an old debt coming home?”
“Wow, Kit, you have a grasp of the obvious that’s worthy of a cop.” She stood up—most of the filth now out of her spotted brown fur—walked over to the window and slapped the wet shirt across his midsection.
“Your shirt.”
Nohar wrung out the shirt and tied it around his waist. “Thanks, Angel— Can you help? I need someone with better vision than I have.”
Angel sighed. “What you want?”
“I need to find a window overlooking a ranch house with a shot-out picture window.”
“You say shot?” A real smile overcame the ghost of the scar.
“Yes. I can’t pick it out—”
She shook her head. “Kit, I didn’t know the cops were hiring—”
“I am not a cop!”
Angel stepped back, still smiling, showing a pair of prominent front teeth. “Sore point? What are you then? What you looking for?”
“I’m a private detective. I’m trying to find a sniper.”
She laughed and said, “I can tell you who. What I get?”
It took Nohar half a second to realize she was serious. He closed the distance between them in an instant and grabbed her shoulders. There was a brief adrenaline rush, but he contained it.
“Tell me.”
“Not for nothing.”
“What do you want?”
“You played the savior, play it all the way. I want protection. You’re a big one, Kit. Keep Zipheads from expressing me to nowhere again.”
She had him. He’d gone to the tr
ouble of saving her life. Now, he had to make it worth something.
Nohar looked into her eyes and she stopped smiling. “I will, if you tell me two things. First, why are they after you?”
She shrugged. “Made stupid mistake. I tried to keep Stigmata, my gang, going after the Zips moved in. Didn’t know then that they were backed from downtown. My clutch didn’t fall off the map; so got erased.”
Nohar could live with that. “You on flush—or anything else?”
“Do I look stupid?”
He told himself not to answer that.
He might as well play the samaritan while he could. ”You get the couch.”
Chapter 10
Nohar didn’t see any rats when he parked the Jerboa across from his office. He hoped that meant Fearless Leader and his cronies were laying low. Even so, he was nervous, and Angel was more so. He gave her his shirt—it dragged on the ground when she wore it—and had her hold her ears down.
With ears down and her body covered, she could pass for a deformed rat.
It was the longest three blocks Nohar had ever walked.
They got to his apartment, and no ambush was waiting for them. Nohar breathed easier once he managed to unwedge the warped door and close it behind them.
Cat ran up, as usual, and seemed puzzled to find one of Nohar’s shirts moving under its own power. When Angel lowered a hand, Cat shied away and hissed, but the moment she stopped paying attention to him, Cat attacked the end of her foot that struck out from under the edge of the shirt.
“Ouch! Shit, Kit; put a leash on it.”
“His name is Cat. If you have an argument with his behavior, you have to take it up with him. He doesn’t listen to me.”
Cat backed up, crouched, shook his ass back and forth, and pounced on Angel’s exposed toes.
Angel jerked her foot up and Cat tumbled back into the living room. She twitched her nose and snorted. “You think that name up by yourself?”
Angel unbuttoned the shirt and took it off. She tossed it so it landed on Cat. Cat found the shirt more absorbing than Angel’s toes, and he started rolling across the living room floor buried inside it. Occasionally a paw would come out and swipe at the air. Angel made for the couch. Nohar went into the kitchen and filled a bottle of water. When he returned with it, she took the bottle and started drinking greedily.
By the time she’d finished her first bottle, Nohar had already made the trip for the second one. She drank this one more leisurely, and her story came out.
Angel had seen the sniper on the twenty-fourth, the stormy Thursday. “Ancient history now,” she said. Stigmata still had a few loyal holdouts at the time. By then, though, the Zips had confined Stigmata’s turf to the tower. War was about to break out all over. Everyone knew that. The Zips were going to vanish the remaining gangs. Only three were left—Babylon, Vixen, and Stigmata. According to Angel, Vixen’s last shred of territory was the strip of Mayfield Road between Kenelworth and the concrete barrier, and Babylon was hunkered down in an enclave somewhere on Morey Hill.
Everyone was edgy. There was always someone watching, hidden behind a wall of rubble in the lobby. Angel, and the rest of them, wanted the chance to take some ratboys down with them. The twenty-fourth was her watch and Thursday was the night all hell broke loose. Angel thought Stigmata must’ve been the first of the mopup because the Zips must’ve realized there were only six members left.
The Zips weren’t subtle about it. They announced their presence by having a burning station wagon rocket into the building. She told him car wrecks were a territorial symbol for the Zips. The wagon was loaded with explosives and went off in the lobby. Not enough to do any major damage, but enough to spook the whole building and knock Angel out before she could get warning upstairs.
She was only out a few minutes, just long enough for her and the ratboys to miss each other. The rats had made their way upstairs and she could hear gunfire and fighting above her. The Zips had left three as rearguard to catch stragglers. Two brown males and a white female hung around the open stairwell. Angel said she wanted to be sure of taking down one particular rodent. They didn’t know she was there, the fighting covered her noise and the garbage covered her smell. She aimed her Nicaraguan ten-millimeter at the white one’s head. Their leader, Angel said.
She was about to lay a slug right between the white rat’s eyes when the canine showed.
“This guy was a chiller, Kit. Should’ve seen that righteous weapon.”
From Angel’s description, that “righteous weapon” had to be a Levitt. It was two meters long, with a scope the length and twice the diameter of Angel’s forearm. The canine was carrying the weapon in one hand, a tripod in the other.
The newcomer was out of place at the scene of a gang war. The way Angel described him, the genetechs that designed him were at least as advanced as the ones who produced Nohar’s stock. That made the canine Pakistani or Afghan.
Nohar had a bad feeling that he had met this canine before.
Angel described a dog with the domestic veneer removed. The canine was lean and had a shaggy gray coat, prominent snout, green eyes. He stood about two meters and massed about 100 kilos. Angel said he looked mean enough to take a bite out of a manhole cover.
“He had a raghead accent. Walked right to Terin—the white one—and asked, ‘Is the roof cleared?’ Ain’t going to forget him. You could smell my people getting whacked up topside, and I smell him when he passes me. He was getting off. The blood was turning him on something fierce.
“She calls him Hassan, Hazed, Hazy—something like that.”
Damn it, it was Hassan. The same morey who offed Nugoya. Nohar shook his head. What the hell did a small-time pimp and a gang war have to do with Daryl Johnson and the franks running MLI?
“There’s this mother of arguments between Terin and the pooch. The raghead is blowing my shot, standing right in front of me—”
“What were they arguing about?”
“Fuck if I know, Kit. Terin’s pissed for some reason, like the dog is treading on her territory. She also rants about her best people being dragged off to the four corners of the country—hell and gone, she said. Dog’s frosty, though—think he’s got the handle on the Zip’s supplier, guns and drugs. Terin can mouth off, but not do much. Pissed her good.
“After blowing off steam, she leads him up. There goes my shot. I might’ve written myself off to get Terin, but I wasn’t about to give it up for two goons. I laid it low. Not that I wasn’t tempted when they tossed Hernandez out a window, but not much I could do. I waited them out, hoping for another shot at Terin. Didn’t happen.”
Nohar was sitting on the floor across from Angel. Cat, half wrapped in the shirt, had tired of his game and had come to rest by Nohar. Angel was chugging her third liter of water.
“Thy caught up with you.”
“Inevitable. They knew all of us. Snatched me by surprise—five to one, they like that kind of odds—up the Midtown Corridor. Wasn’t in Moreytown so my guard was off. Was last Thursday—end of the month—the day after Vixen bought it.”
Nohar remembered the burning Subaru and the dead foxes, both Wednesday.
Angel was still talking. “Surprised they didn’t vanish me then and there. Upset I’d survived, more upset I had been at the tower when the raghead dog showed—someone saw me book outta there an’ told the Zips. Terin wanted to know if I had told people, told her to fuck off. Pissed her good. Took me back to the tower an’ pumped me with flush. Someone calling the shots said look like an O.D. That really pissed Terin. I could tell she wanted to off me painful. Must’ve been Friday when they left me. What day is it?”
“Sunday.”
Angel yawned and stretched out on the couch. She barely filled a third of it. “Well, I’m getting some real sleep.”
She fell asleep instantly.
They should have pumped a
nother into her—but that would have looked like murder—and they were trying to make it look like an O.D.
Why? Because she’d seen the canine?
Again, what the hell did Zipperhead have to do with Daryl Johnson?
Nohar had a nasty thought—another morey uprising?
He shuddered at the idea. He’d been through that once already, when he was in the Hellcats. His own father had been shot, deservedly, by the National Guard.
“Don’t let it be a political killing,” Nohar whispered to Cat.
• • •
The express mail people had left a message for him. He’d have to come pick up his package of ID replacements, they didn’t deliver to his neighborhood.
Nohar let Angel sleep when he went out. Once he got most of his wallet replaced, Nohar realized there was nothing for his guest to eat. Nohar did some hasty shopping down by the city end of Mayfield Road, around University Circle.
Then, now that he had a card-key replacement, he stopped at his office.
The Triangle office building was a crumbling brick structure that was still trying to fight off the advancing decay from Moreytown. The brick looked like a patchwork from the many attempts to remove graffiti. It was getting dark, and the timers had yet to turn on the lights inside. There was just enough light to give Nohar a slight purple tint to his vision. He climbed the stairs in the empty darkness. Nobody else was around this late on a Sunday.
His office lived in the darkness at the end of a second floor hallway. It didn’t even have a number to distinguish it. The door was simply a fogged-glass rectangle with a basic card-key lock. Nohar ran his key through the lock and the door slid aside with a slight puff of air.
The room was barely big enough to hold Nohar, even though it only contained two items of furniture—a comm that was a few generations out of date, and a file cabinet that was older than the building it lived in. Nohar knelt down and punched the combination on the padlock that held the bottom drawer shut.
“Comm on.”
The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1 Page 10